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Quotes

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

—George Borrow, 1843

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1830

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

—Robert Byrd, 2005

The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.

—John Nance Garner, c. 1967

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.

—Quintus Fabius Maximus, c. 203 BC

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

—Anthony Burgess, 1972